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African Music Vol 7 No 4(Seb)

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African Music Vol 7 No 4(Seb) ON TEACHING AMERICANS TO PLAY MBIRA LIKE ZIMBABWEANS 1 7 5 ON TEACHING AMERICANS TO PLAY MBIRA LIKE ZIMBABWEANS by ERICA AZIM In teaching the 1,000-year old Shona mbira tradition of Zimbabwe, I have discovered that Western students have great difficulty in learning to hear mbira music in a Shona way. Though Western students are able to learn to play basic traditional parts, it often takes them years to master the more difficult cross-cultural aspects of the music, including the style of improvisation. Improvising in a Shona way is dependent upon hearing in a Shona way. Interestingly, even beginning mbira students are often able to experience spiritual states such as peace, clarity and presence, which are among the effects of mbira music that aid its function in traditional ceremonies. These apparently universal effects of Shona mbira music are presently attracting students from around the world to the study of mbira, and hold their interest during the lengthy period required to learn to hear and improvise in a Shona way. Teaching North American, European and Australian mbira students to hear, play and improvise in a traditional Shona way has been an ongoing challenge, from which I will share some thoughts and experiences here. How I learned I began studying Shona karimba, marimba, singing and dance with Dumisani Maraire in 1970, when I was a 16-year old ethnomusicology student at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. At that time, no recordings of Shona mbira (sometimes called mbira dza vadzimu by ethnomusicologists) were available in the U.S. — Paul Berliners book and record The Soul of Mbira were yet to be published. After hearing the few scratchy 45rpm mbira records which Maraire and other Zimbabweans had carried to Seattle, and a few minutes of field recordings made by Professor Robert Garfias, I fell in love with mbira music and decided to be a mbira player. After two years of study with Maraire, I was privileged to borrow a mbira from Garfias ’ office shelf, and started out with only the knowledge of which finger and thumb should play which keys. I taught myself to play by ear, based on my knowledge of Maraire’s marimba and karimba arrangements of mbira pieces, and the few recordings mentioned above. Unfortunately, none of the recordings were solo performances, so I was left to guess which notes were played by the kushaura (leading) and kutsinhira (intertwining) mbira parts. Also, my borrowed mbira was not tuned to the same pitch as the recordings, so playing along with them was not an option. Somehow, I was able to teach myself to play — a lengthy but very joyful 176 JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF AFRICAN MUSIC process. While my playing was not quite traditional because kushaura and kutsinhira notes were mixed together, the songs were recognizable to Zimbabweans and I became intimately familiar with the location of sounds on my instrument. After leaving my ethnomusicology studies and working for some time, I was finally able to travel from my native California to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) to study mbira in 1974-1975. With youthful luck (or, perhaps, the guidance of Shona spirits, as I was firmly told by my mbira teachers), various coincidences enabled me to meet several excellent mbira players within two months of my arrival. This was somewhat amazing, because the racist Rhodesian government placed severe restrictions on me, a young white woman travelling in a country tom by revolution, including a ban on trips to the rural village areas where I had intended to study mbira. While I learned from dozens of mbira players, my greatest influences as teachers were Beauler Dyoko, Cosmas Magaya, Mondrek Muchena and Ephat Mujuru. I was taught in the traditional way — rote memorization of kushaura and kutsinhira parts to many traditional pieces. However, I was able to learn very quickly, because I had been playing and listening to Shona music for four years, and was very familiar with the instrument. Soon I was performing with my teachers, playing mbira and singing in various traditional and contemporary contexts. I will leave description of my experiences at that time for a future writing. What is relevant to my development as a mbira teacher is the fact that I gradually began to understand much about the system of Shona mbira improvisation and kutsinhira part development, which I wished that I had been taught from the start. Learning mbira: the Shona and non-Shona student About ten years ago, I met an American who had encountered mbira for the first time while in Zimbabwe for other studies. He was taught in the traditional way and, being a quick learner, mastered basic kushaura and kutsinhira parts to many pieces. However, if he left the basic parts to attempt even a slight improvisation, his music suddenly sounded completely un-Shona. He could play a mbira piece, but could not hear it in a Shona way and therefore could not improvise in a Shona way. From a Western perspective, Shona mbira music is in some ways musically similar to jazz. ‘Standards’, in this case traditional pieces, are performed year after year — in the case of mbira, century after century. Each has spacious opportunity for improvisation within the style of the genre. This renders each performance of a piece fresh and new. Anyone can learn a basic Shona mbira piece through rote memorization, but how is the style of improvisation learned? It has been my observation that improvisation is not taught in Zimbabwe. As the Shona mbira student gradually becomes familiar with the location of sounds on the instrument through learning basic parts to many songs, he starts to add elaboration drawn from his lifetime collection of memories of hearing the piece performed many times by experienced musicians. Selection of specific variations is inspired by what he is hearing in the music at the moment. ON TEACHING AMERICANS TO PLAY MBIRA LIKE ZIMBABWEANS 1 7 7 When a Shona person learns mbira in Zimbabwe, he or she has heard mbira since before birth — a lifetime. The sounds are already known, and learning to play consists of learning to perform the actions needed to produce the desired music. How then can the style of Shona mbira improvisation be imparted to anon-Shona student who has no lifetime of musical memories to guide him or her? Different ways of listening One significant difference in both structure and listening is that Western music progresses in a linear fashion, while Shona mbira music is completely circular — no note in the cycle is any more the beginning or the end than any other note. Moreover, performance of the piece may consist of repeating the cycle for two minutes or two hours. The Western mbira student has a tendency, from his linear musical background, to hear the beginning of a mbira piece as the point in the cycle where his teacher started when introducing the piece. If his teacher starts at a different point in the cycle at the next lesson, the student may not even recognize the piece as the one he learned! This linear approach must be counteracted in order to learn to listen to mbira in a Shona way. Another major difference in the Western and Shona approaches to listening is that there is a vertical approach in Western music, with attention to chords and their progression. Shona mbira listening, however, appears to be horizontal, with attention placed on dozens of simultaneous intertwining single-note melodies. These are the melodies which are sung and improvised upon on the mbira; without hearing them, the Western student cannot improvise in a Shona way. Because I started playing and listening to Shona music when I was so young, my Shona hearing was unconscious, and I did not realize at first that it would be difficult to impart to my students. My first teaching methods My initial teaching method included two principal steps, which I thought of as how I wish I had been taught. The first step was the method I used to learn new mbira pieces myself. I compiled a 90-minute cassette of many different recordings of the mbira piece to be taught, performed by various individual mbira players and mbira groups. I instructed students to listen to it all the time — while going to sleep, driving to work, etc. — and to sing or hum along with it. This step was intended to make the sound of the piece familiar, and to compensate for the student not having heard it all her life. By including many different musicians on the tape who improvise in different, but traditionally Shona, ways, a subliminal understanding of the outer limits of Shona improvisation on the piece was also introduced. The second step was the unmasking of the Shona style of improvisation through teaching the first mbira piece in great depth. First, I taught a very simple basic kushaura part to the mbira piece — the seed of the tree the piece could become. I gradually taught the student a great variety of ways to improvise on the kushaura 1 7 8 JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF AFRICAN MUSIC part, and then several different styles of kutsinhira parts, in different rhythms. As each variation was introduced, I showed the student how the variation consisted of either doubling or substituting notes from the seed part in other octaves. In this way, I illustrated to the student that all the branches and roots of the tree (high- and low-pitched variations) came directly from the original seed (basic part). Other components of my instruction method included teaching the student how to fit lcushaura and kutsinhira parts with the hosho (rattle) pattern and each other.
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